This is one of those moments that proves it is so incredible hard to create a sequel and have be as good, or better than the original. This episode was no where near as creative as the first one however it did offer us a chance to flesh out what the show was going to become over the next few years. I remember very little of the “behind the scenes” events surrounding the episode save for getting the Sunday paper with a creepy John Deer tractor baby doll ad in it. The baby had an eerie resemblance to my friend and classmate Chris Morrison’s youngest brother Nicholas. We thought it a funny little “interruption” to the “normal” flow of the episode. However forgetting that an “interruption” usually goes in the middle of an episode somewhere, not at the beginning. So what did we interrupt I say? Hopefully everyone’s “normal” lives with some creepiness. An episode about a baby being born into doggie doo would certainly qualify as such.

There are some parts about this episode I love yet a lot of it makes me sad. This episode just didn’t hit the same mark that the pervious episode did. It was sluggish and ill timed in parts, not all but some. Also my traditional intro was not there, instead I was calling it “Live with Starlight Steve” as if there was anything live about it, and I only had one hello, I didn’t yell, and I never said I was the host in the beginning. I also was not caught off guard as became a foundation in which to start every episode. The invention of the advertisement instead of silence was something to come in at a later date as well as at the end “Happy travels if you are going somewhere.” hadn’t turned into the staple “Have safe travels where ever you make go.”

One thing you are going to hear in Starlight Steve that no other radio show does is the plethora of additional sounds in the background and sometimes in the foreground. There is crunching, munching, slurping, burping, slapping, tapping, slamming, blaming, clanking, spanking, larfing and barfing. (larfing is laughing I just had to make it rhyme.) It can add to the episode or distract depending on your mood or imagination or how funny we happen to be on a given day. But one thing is for sure the older episode are “nosier” in the background then they newer ones. It can seem cluttered sometimes but it does add a depth to the episode. There are many times I hear an episode for the fifth or sixth time and start laughing at something new.

I will have to say my favorite part of this show is when Slick Doggie Doo announced he was born it some doggie “left behinds.” I had just taken a big bite of a sloppy Joe at this time and could not contain my surprise as to this comment. I ended up spewing it all over my plate and in the sink I believe too. All the sounds are immensely funny but Jonny’s laughing and muttering cracks me up every time. I still to this day don’t know what he was saying right before I ralfed all over my plate but its worth listening to three or four times.

There is one last thing worth mentioning about this episode and pretty much most of the earlier ones and that is the reference to MaplewoodAcademy. It began in the original because Jonny went there and I asked him questions relating to his experience there, but here in this episode we have continued the joke for no other reason than to make fun of people we knew up there. How the audience should take it? It’s just some High School up the road from our recording studio that we send our witless guests up to check out the ladies. We eventually dropped it from the show due to two reasons, first being we moved locations, and second we were getting older and it was getting even creepier that our show already was.

This episode may have been strange, and a little sloppy in parts but I will have to agree with Jonny in that it set a foundation for a lot of traditions in Starlight Steve to come in, or at lest be refined over time into what they are today. I am glad we came back, Jonny I really am.